Film Review: Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith.

How did this film suck? Let me count the ways:

I will begin by admitting that I have watched Empire probably more than 200 times at this point. Yes, I am a dork. It is the gold standard of Starwarsdom, and my favorite film of all time. No apologies.

But I had high hopes for ROTS, (a weirdly appropriate acronym), due to pathologically misguided friendly reviews, word of mouth from my less-demanding compadres, and just my own yearning that George Lucas could make the most important chapter in his sextology not suck donkey balls.

No such luck. This movie is horrible, not despite the fact that it has such cutting-edge visual effects, but more precisely because it bets its wad on those visual effects to carry it. And they don't. Not by a long shot.

Frankly, I must admit, I hate CGI in live action films. It's fine for The Incredibles, a much better movie than this one (which, oddly, has a lengthy Star Wars tribute in it), but that was an animated film aimed at children, for chrissakes. Yet Lucas' demented obsession with it has ruined everything that used to work in his films: Artoo as a glow-in-the-dark CGI cartoon? I'm sorry, was a robot playing a robot, as was the gig in the original trilogy, somehow inadequate to the demands of a modern audience? Yep, sheeny CGI Artoo with cartoonish, unrealistic movements beats the hell out of an actual droid and a midget in a trash can. Computer simulation, after all, looks so much better than actual material objects on film--so real that I sometimes confuse my PS2 games for live-event television.

And the sets! Wow, does a CG forest on the wookie homeworld look better than the Redwoods of California did in Jedi. Come to think of it, the canyon scenes in whateverthehell world Obi-Wan tracks down General Grievous also excel the extant majesty of the Grand Canyon. And the herky-jerky space battle scenes clearly exceed the incredible-looking dogfights from Empire, don't they? Because CGI is newer, it simply must look better than the moving-model stuff of the 80's, right? Gosh, the utterly-authentic looking twists and turns of the Milleneum Falcon wilt before the Scooby-Doo sabotage droids attacking General Kenobi's fighter in the opening scene!

Have I forgotten to mention the Jedi-Sith duels? Heck, live actors with occasional stunt doubles certainly pale in comparison to CGI Count Dooku-style flips and force-manipulations against the Jedi. Oh, wait, the latter look utterly ridiculous.

Let's ask a question: which looks better--is it Lord Vader gliding ominously down the steps he's just beaten his son down in Empire, or the cartoonish battle between Dooku and the Jedi in our present film? I know where my vote is. Congrats, George, you made a better-written, better-directed, better-looking film twenty-five years ago. Good show. It's devolved, even, from The Phantom Menace. Chan-ho Park (Darth Maul) actually did his flips; now we have the guys that brought you Toy Story creating flips for you.

But that's just the tip o' the iceberg. The movie's dialogue is so wretched, particularly during the first hour, that I actually comtemplated walking out. I am convinced that Tom Stoppard's "uncredited assistance" is an abject myth: the guy that wrote Rozencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and Shakespeare in Love had about as much to do with this screenplay as Michael Moore has to do with Weight Watchers. Annikin and Padme's exchanges stink so bad that it makes a fella wonder if George Lucas has ever even gotten any.

But that's not all that's wrong with it: let's not forget the (once again) glaring inconsistencies in the story: Leia has memories of her mother in Jedi, remarkably precocious as her mother now dies 90 seconds after her birth. Count Dooku spins like a top at 60, despite the fact that 60-year-old Obi-Wan's "powers are weak, old man," when he confronts Vader in Episode Four. This, despite the fact that he's been in training for twenty years, communing with his teacher, as we find out from the final exchange between Obi-Wan and Yoda. And Yoda goes from being a quasi-omnipotent ninja here to a secluded cripple in Empire, in a mere twenty years? What's up with that?

Could the fight between Yoda and Emperor Palpatine, by-the-way, have been any cheesier? They spend the climax of it flinging pizzas at each other! This is the battle that decides the rise of the Empire? Besides, Palpatine declares that Yoda isn't dead until they find his body after he falls (despite the fact that Jedi and Sith alike can now fly), when we've all already seen that Yoda leaves no body when he does finally die. Watch your own movies much, George?

The film makes so many bad choices that I want, truly, to give it an "F." But I can't, both because it's not in me and because it does, in it's own utterly incompetent way, set the stage for the original trilogy. The final duel between Obi-Wan and Annikin does deliver the goods, because, in a rare moment of sense, Lucas portrays Annakin's defeat as a matter of arrogance and poor choice, and not inferior ability. Ewan MacGregor's Obi-Wan does do a great job of assymilating his personal failure as a teacher while realizing his need to end the threat that he's created and empowered. It presages nicely the rematch of the past-his-prime teacher with the still-powerful tutee in A New Hope. I just wish the rest of this bloated, overlong, badly-written mess could have followed suit.

Grade: C-minus.